We don’t get an opportunity to cover the adult industry much these days and boy have things moved on since the heady days of 0900 numbers leading to an overpriced, crackly ‘chat’ with a recorded voice. Now we have wall-to-wall UGC-ed ‘porn tubes’ – which incidentally, since they are UGC, may not have to adhere to the strict new UK laws on registering the age of adult entertainment participants, but that’s another story for another time – and OnlyFans.
What hasn’t changed, however, is how the adult industry still leads in deploying cutting edge technology and getting it accepted by the mass market.
This week, leading OnlyFans creator Amouranth has done a deal with EdenAI to create a GenAI powered avatar– or digital twin, as the company likes to think of it – that will be able to interact live with fans via voice, video and text, 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
While World Telemedia has its own GenAI avatar – Zoe, who is currently resting between shows (we unplugged her, another advantage of this kind of tech) – these virtual simulacra of people have been slow to gain ground, despite the tech making them eminently workable and there being a very definite role for them to fulfil. Perhaps the adoption of the tech by such a popular content creator as Amouranth will change all that?
Businesses are certainly backing that particular horse. As we reported earlier in the month, Amdocs has expanded its generative AI platform, amAIz, with what it calls “innovative agentic AI capabilities that redefine customer interaction for communications service providers (CSPs)”. It doesn’t sound as sexy as OnlyFans running digital twins, but these new capabilities include the GenAI Care and Sales Agents, designed to provide seamless support, manage billing inquiries and facilitate conversational selling. In Amdoc’s words: “offering a comprehensive set of solutions for next-generation customer engagement”. And what, if not customer service, is Amouranth really using this for?
This nexus of GenAI, messaging, engagement and customer service is going to be big. While there is much about it handling run of the mill billing enquiries, it has enormous potential in bringing pretty much everything online to life in a more human/humanoid way.
I for one would happily converse with apps and services, even if I knew I was talking to a GenAI with a human face. But what of using it to create whole new categories of services? Just imagine the entertainment potential of online robots that can converse. These can literally build a proper relationship between customer and service.
There are already ‘romantic’ avatars that you can forge a relationship with if you are lonely – why not extend this to everything? World Telemedia’s Zoe was an insight into how this handled simple FAQs on a commercial website. What if you take that forwards and get it handling sales, greeting people, persuading people to come along, introducing the conference?
While I could be talking myself out of a job, I am only partly joking. I think we are on the cusp of a radical shift in how we use ‘robots’. They won’t be walking, talking human butlers (nor, probably, killing machines sent from the future: I’m looking at you Sarah Connor), but they will be avatars that are the voice and face and personality of a raft of new interactive services, games and more.
Couple this with the rise of RCS – Sinch has done more than 1 billion RCS business messages in 2024 – which brings richness and interactivity to the fore and you could see GenAI avatars pushing content and messaging through these channels too.
It is also likely to reshape advertising. Digital advertising has boomed in 2024 and is set for more growth. Imagine what it could be like to essentially add robots to adverts: personalised ads that talk to you and only you about what you are interested in.
This has a massive impact on digital display ads, search ads and even on the nascent commerce media ads, where consumer facing businesses leverage their first-party data to offer ad space online to interested and relevant companies.
Enriching these with avatars adds a whole new and much needed level of personalisation, which in turn brings in more money. It could also be a boon to user acquisition, which is in dire need of a fillip to overcome the rising costs and diminishing returns.
In fact, there isn’t a facet of telemedia and telecoms that can’t be enhanced with GenAI that talks the talk and, virtually at least, walks the walk that consumers want to see and hear. It is the next level in personalisation and is going to be key to creating new services and to acquiring users of those services. It is the rise of the machines, but perhaps not the dystopian view we often get served up, but more one that makes marketing, content and services more appealing?
